The invention relates generally to integrated communication systems and more particularly to a system for integrating a plurality of weapon control radars which may be used against all targets.
Most naval fighting vessels have several weapon control radars, each radar having its own antenna, and the radars together occupy more than one frequency band. However, each radar with its associated antenna is dedicated to a separate single target and no provisions are made for augmenting one radar with another in difficult situations. That is, existing weapon control systems include N radars and N antennas, each antenna and its associated radar tracking a separate target. Thus, the loss of a weapon control radar antenna results in the loss of the associated radar system. Also, a radar may operate over a frequency band that may cause elevation lobing nulls in a low angle region so that a target becomes undetectable by that radar while the target is in that region.
Weapon control radars drastically over-sample targets, i.e., the data rate is much higher than necessary. For example, most weapon control radars employ a pulse repitition rate of approximately 1 KHZ whereas the weapon control systems require data at only about 10 HZ. The present invention exploits the high data-rate to increase the number of tracked targets at a lower data-rate per target by time-sharing the radars among the antennas, so that N antennas track N targets and each radar tracks all the targets. Thus, a radar may track many more targets than is presently allowable.
Significant advantages have been achieved by integrating surveillance radars with an integrated automatic detector and track (IADT) system. An IADT system requires that each radar in its system illuminates all the targets, which is a feature of surveillance radars. Therefore, an IADT system is not applicable to weapon control radars, because each weapon control radar looks at a different target.